Ack, bleep, expletive, hiss, snarl, ptui, hairball.

There, I feel better.

Finished chapter three of Vardishak's Road but took two days to do it since the day before yesterday, most of it was spent with a friend who visited-- and during the visit, my back went whang sproing, my *leg* went off and swelled again and every joint in my body started screaming between yellow and red alert. To the point that I had to lay down on the bed again for the last four or five hours of my friend's visit, looking at her art and trying to concentrate on fine points of illustration technique while my nervous system went into hyperdistraction mode. Yargh.

I'm feeling a bit pressured for time. Mostly because it takes so long to do the rewrites and I need to ship stuff out, but I'm not getting income yet cause I haven't shipped yet. Mrrow. It's not usually this frustrating except when my back goes bonkers.

Qufur the orange kittencat has become a part timer. His previous humans knocked on our door and wanted him back, so we had to let him out again. But they don't let him back into their house so he cries outside and then when any of us go out he comes back in, so he's in sometimes and out sometimes. A cat with two domiciles, and he seems to like ours better. Possibly because his big fluffy friend Ari is here ready to play with him every time he comes over.

He's back in the house now and so, I guess House Bloodrose has one and a half cats. >^..^< >^.

Rewriting Vardishak's Road now. That was my 3 Day Novel. I did about 6,000 words of background stuff and did fix up the Cycle, adding the hruntsa -- native big tusked critters including elephants, boars, horned things, anything big and nasty and herbivorous though there's a specific "hruntsa" animal I still have to draw to know exactly what it's like.

On into turning 40,017 words into roughly 75,000 or more, detailing and padding. I had 17 chapters and the pacing's cool. But I need to have bigger chapters. 4,412 words a chapter on average, whatever that chapter started as... and it is JUST as hard as the cutting. I'm adding description but more dialogue and conflict and side arguments seems to work better. 3,777 so far from a start of 2,459 -- and about half of that is more banter and punishment during the big fight at the top of the chapter. Which works.

Nap, then a visit from a friend, then back to it cause I won't put it down till it's good -- and it's at or close to length. Onward!

Chazho Rewrite Done.

Running total: 31,892 for the first five days of Year of the Rewrites.

It still needs one last polishing line edit and proofread, plus two changes. One's cat hoovering: I need to tweak the Cycle one last time to punch up the boring Houses no one wants to play in the RPG that I don't usually write about, so they're fun and worth getting protagonists someday. The other is that Dorayan's mother Valira and the Time Thief, Galiera, have sound-alike names. So I'll rename his mom.

But it's basically done and it will ship real soon. The great Weigh-In will get posted later... when I find out how much I've cut. I do not feel like doing the Word transposition or opening all the chapters at once right now to clog Toshi's poor little memory. But when I do, I'll post it. :D

Robert and Ari >^..^<